PITTSFIELD, Mass. (WGGB/WSHM) - As the United States moves closer to its 250th birthday this year, we continue our “We the People” series. We’re highlighting one of the most iconic American authors of the 19th century.

His masterpiece — a book about obsession, vengeance, and the sea — is a cornerstone of American literature. But while it’s set upon a sailing ship far from land, it wasn’t written anywhere near the ocean.

In fact, the author was living on a farm not far from the highest point in Massachusetts, “it’s been called the great American novel, Moby Dick. It’s author, Herman Melville, is from New York, but you know if this is a “we the people” story, there must be a western Mass. connection – and there is. In fact, it’s the house behind me in Pittsfield, because this is where he wrote it,” said Lesley Herzberg.

Tucked away in this second story room in his Berkshire County farmhouse, 30-year-old Herman Melville set his writing desk against this window. The year of 1850 and he’d just recently purchased the home, along with some 160 acres — naming it Arrowhead because of the Native American artifacts found nearby. It was a busy place, as all farms tend to be. Melville took care of livestock, as well as planting crops and harvesting apples, and his household was no less active.

“So, he moved here with 3 unmarried sisters, his mother maria, his wife lizzie, his one-year-old son Malcolm. They would have 3 more children while they lived here between 1851 and 1855… and then 2 maids and a farm hand,” as Executive Director of the Berkshire County Historical Society, Lesley Herzberg explained, finding the time and solitude to write was understandable a challenge.

So, it’s no surprise Melville would — after his chores were done — lock himself up here for some peace and quiet, “so, he would say I would rise at 8 or thereabouts and go to my barn and feed my animals, my horse, and my cow. And then he would come upstairs, close the door, and he would say he would spread his papers on his desk, take on business squint at it, and then fall to with a will,” Herzberg said.

He was already a published author by this time, mainly focusing on stories related to the ocean. And so, one winter day, as he sat down right here to work on his latest manuscript, he couldn’t help by admire the impressive view. Off in the distance loomed the snow-covered slopes of Mount Greylock, the tallest mountain in the Baystate.

But to Melville, it looked less like geography and more like the great humping shape of a whale — a white whale, “So, when people imagine him writing Moby Dick, you know – the imagine Melville looking out over the ocean and of course that’s not true. He was looking out over a field at a mountain here in the Berkshires,” Herzberg said.

Melville had been a sailor when he was a younger man, and he would turn, time and again, to the ocean and his travels across the globe for inspiration, particularly the 3 years he spent on a whaling ship.

He also found encouragement from fellow author turned close friend and mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had a summer house close by. Hawthorne, working on his own book at the time, even wrote, “on the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his ‘white whale’, while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study-window.”

But while the concept for Moby Dick may have been gigantic — the success of the book was not, “he truly believed that this was the greatest novel he had written and when it wasn’t appreciated in that way, it. He really took a hit in terms of how he thought of himself as a writer,” Herzberg said.

But time has a way of rescuing the truth, and by the turn of the next century — the world eventually caught up to Moby Dick, a whale inspired by a mountain, in a book authored right here in western Mass. A work that sold fewer than 4,000 copies in Melville’s entire lifetime — now considered one of the greatest pieces of American literature every written.

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